Interstellar

As I type, Interstellar is at position 15 on IMDB's top 250
movies of all time. I don't know about that, but it's still
pretty good.
So Mrs. Salad and I thought it would be a
good
idea to catch this spectacular flick before it vanished from theaters.
It was more comprehensible than it might have been:
I'm a subscriber to Wired, and their December 2014 issue
was more or less an a spoiler-free ad for Interstellar, with
plenty of hints about the speculative science it involved.

Matthew McConaughey plays farmer/widower/ex-astronaut Cooper. He lives with
his 10-year-old daughter (Murph) and 15-year-old son (Tom) on a
not-too-distant-future dying Earth. Details are a little hazy, but
widespread plant blight has caused famine, nasty dust storms, and
(worst) a crippling effect on the national psyche. (In an especially
poignant bit, it's revealed that Murph's newest school textbooks describe
the Apollo program as a hoax, made up by NASA to bankrupt the old
Soviet Union. Hey, it worked!)

Mankind's only hope is to get the hell off the planet. But how?
Cooper and Murph stumble across a secret government program: what's
left of NASA has discovered a wormhole out by Saturn that leads to
another galaxy, and there are a number of possibly inhabitable worlds
at the other end. The only thing lacking is a skilled astronaut
to pilot the ship, and Cooper is quickly recruited.
So they're off, with Cooper leaving Murph and Tom behind,
on a mission that has small chance of success, and an even
smaller chance that Cooper will return to his kids. Tom's OK with that,
but Murph is bitter and resentful.

What follows is a heartstring-tugging family drama intertwined
with spectacular hard-as-nails science
fiction. I'm pretty sure there's never been as much relativistic
astrophysics in any other movie. Kip Thorne, who has been a leading
researcher in the field for decades, was an advisor to the film,
so technical details are as accurate as you're likely to find.

It's pretty much all good. Acting is first-rate (IMDB counts eight
Oscar nominees/winners among the cast). And, well, it's Christopher
Nolan-directed.
My only gripe is that I couldn't
understand some of the McConaughey dialogue, some combination of
his Texas accent and Cinemagic's poor sound system.

Frivoloties du Jour - 2014-12-31

In Washington scandal news, the Internal Revenue Service, responding
to a subpoena, tells congressional investigators that it cannot produce
28 months of Lois Lerner’s emails because the hard drive they were
stored on failed, and the hard drive was thrown away, and the backup
tapes were erased, and no printed copies were saved — contrary to the
IRS’s own record-keeping policy, which was eaten by the IRS’s dog. “It
was just one crazy thing after another,” states the IRS, “and it got us
to thinking: All these years we’ve been subjecting taxpayers to
everything short of rectal probes if they can’t produce EVERY SINGLE
DOCUMENT WE WANT, and here we lose YEARS worth of official records! So
from now on, if taxpayers tell us they lost something, or just plain
forgot to make a tax payment, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, whatever! Stuff
happens!’ Because who are we to judge?”

I will also mention that Dave is very generous about
crediting the people who suggest items for his blog.

A for-profit Florida college used exotic dancers as
admissions officers, falsified documents and coached students to lie on
financial forms as it fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in
federal money, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Miami.

I'm not saying that administrators at the University Near Here are
slapping their foreheads, wondering "Why didn't we think of
that?" But I'm not saying they aren't, either.

A previous Season-One-only release
was widely held to be insultingly dreadful. (My 2007 blog post on the
issue is here,
and I'm still kind of fond of my punchline: "I mean, I can't believe, as
God is my witness, how they thought this turkey would fly.")

A major problem was the difficulty in negotiating the music rights.
So the first thing I checked out was Season One, Episode Ten: "A Date with Jennifer".
During the scene where Les Nessman is first trying on his wig
from "Mr. Macho"…

Yes! They restored the original music,
Foreigner's "Hot Blooded", undoing the butchery
introduced by
the series' syndication. I am very encouraged.

But watching these old WKRP episodes raised another question for
me: What the heck is that guy singing in the closing credits?
A little Googling shows there are competing theories. One is at
Wikipedia:

The closing theme, "WKRP In Cincinnati End Credits", was a
hard rock number composed
and performed by Jim Ellis, an Atlanta musician who also recorded some
of the incidental music for the show. According to people who attended
the recording sessions, Ellis didn't yet have lyrics for the closing
theme, so he improvised a semi-comprehensible story about a bartender to
give an idea of how the finished theme would sound. Wilson decided to
use the words anyway, since he felt that it would be funny to use lyrics
that were deliberate gibberish, as a satire on the incomprehensibility
of many rock songs.
Also,
because CBS always had an announcer talking over the closing credits,
Wilson knew that no one would actually hear the closing theme lyrics
anyway.[…]

Hearing it for the first time, the lyrics may indeed sound a bit like
"gibberish and nonsense", but with a little careful listening, most of
the words can be made out. (It only needed someone taking a little time
to do it...

I myself lean toward "gibberish and nonsense". But I encourage you to
make your own call:

Irritants du Jour - 2014-12-30

In the "URLs du Jour" posts,
I usually blog about things I find insightful or funny.
But I'm into my post-Christmas curmudgeon mode. So here are some
items that I've found dishonest, ignorant, or generally irritating
recently:

I'm mostly a libertarian kind of guy, but I'd like to propose
legislation: any pundit
that whines about the "disrespect" shown to New York City Mayor Bill de
Blasio by NYC cops should be required to
produce past writings where he or she griped equally about lack of respect
shown to a GOP politician like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Sarah
Palin, etc. Pundits failing to do so will be required to append
the description "Partisan Hack" to their byline. (E.g.: " Justin
Baragona, Partisan Hack")

I realize there are First Amendment issues here. So maybe just treat
it as a journalistic guideline.

I was Google’s first employee to go on maternity leave. In 1999, I
joined the startup that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had recently
started in my garage. I was four months pregnant. At the time the
company had no revenue and only 15 employees, almost all of whom were
male. Joining a startup pregnant with my first child was risky, but
Larry and Sergey assured me I’d have their support.

So far, Ms. Wojcicki can only be accused of generalizing too broadly
from the experiences of one person (her) whose leave did not derail
one company (Google) from its path to success. But, sure, it's
arguable that a maternity leave benefit can help companies
retain valuable employees. And, if it's true, it's certainly something
normal market
competition will quickly demonstrate: companies offering the benefit
will outperform those that don't.

Ah, but that's not what Ms. Wojcicki is arguing for. Way down in
paragraph four:

According to a survey released in May by the United Nations’
International Labor Organization, the U.S. is the only country in the
developed world that doesn’t offer government-mandated paid maternity
leave. [emphasis added]

Bit of a bait-and-switch there. Despite the headline,
Ms. Wojcicki doesn't really care
whether paid maternity leave is "good for business" or not. She wants it
to be imposed on business. What's good for Google is good for the
USA!

It's easy to poke holes in (what turns out to be)
Ms. Wojcicki's argument.
David Boaz does it in 11 words: "If Only We Could Be
More Like Djibouti, Haiti, and Afghanistan".

But my kvetch is with Ms. Wojcicki's deliberate obfuscation
of her
position, which stripped to essentials is: "We want to do this for your own
good, because you're too stupid to realize your own best
interests." It's an argument statists, like
Ms. Wojcicki, try to prettify, but it's
like putting lipstick on a pig.

And then there are columnists like David Cay Johnston
who recently penned an inequality piece for something
still called Newsweek:
"One
Nation Divided by Wealth". It is a plug
for
his
recent book,
pretty much the standard "progressive" screed on the topic,
and, as such, it has been widely debunked by others.

Now, to be fair, there's stuff in there that isn't wrong. For example,
Johnston notes that, in some states, (some) large employers
are allowed to withhold state income tax from (some of) their employees'
paychecks—and hang onto it! (To be sure, the states
involved paint this odious practice
as a "job creation" incentive.)

But what struck me was Johnston's inability to maintain a
self-consistent
argument. Paragaph 12 begins:

Worse [sic]
of all, in myriad but oh-so-subtle ways, government helps big
business drain your pockets and destroy competition from family-owned
enterprises.

Note the warm-and-fuzzy feeling Johnston tries to
evoke with "family-owned" here. But later, railing against
wealth-inequality:

And it’s worth remembering that, by definition, most great wealth is in
the form of untaxed capital gains—money that will never be taxed if the
estate tax is repealed, allowing accumulated wealth to be passed on,
untaxed, to heirs.

Good luck maintaining that Johnston-admired
"family-owned enterprise" if the
Johnston-advocated estate tax confiscates
a hefty fraction of its net worth on a family member's demise.

So who knows what Johnston really thinks? Or cares?

And finally, my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, maintains
its occasional tradition of covering
a left-wing
political demonstration with fawning prose, this one an
opportunistic reaction to recent legal doin's in Missouri and
New York:

A large number of motorists passing by could see and interpret the
message of the signs, with things like BLACK LIVES MATTER, WHAT COLOR IS
JUSTICE.

As they passed, horns were honked and thumbs up were given to the
demonstrators. As dusk settled in, one particularly noticeable message
was series of black squares lighted spelling out JUSTICE FOR ALL.

Aw!

Now my guess is that the demonstrators did not
rise to what Thomas
Sowell has called "a lynch-mob atmosphere toward the police."
But who knows? If they did, every indication is that Foster's
would not have reported it.
Nary an inkling or hint is provided that there just might
be another side to the simple story put forth by
the demonstrators. All we get is an orgy of ideological
self-righteousness, which the reporter and his paper are more
than willing to abet.

Prelude to Foundation

As I've mentioned before, I placed Isaac Asimov's SF novels on my
to-be-(re)?read
list a few years back. We're nearing the end of the road.
I was disappointed in Fantastic Voyage II, a tedious slog.
But Prelude to Foundation (which, for some reason, I had
not read before) was an extremely pleasant surprise,
with the Good Doctor punching all my decades-old science fiction
fan-buttons.

The book is set (as you might guess) before the events described
in his famous Foundation series (originally written in the 1940s).
The mathematician
Hari Seldon is visiting the fabulous capital planet of the Galactic
Empire, Trantor, where he's given a talk on the theoretical possibility
of psychohistory: the ability to explain historical trends by the
statistical interaction of humanity over the centuries and light years.

Emperor Cleon, via his shadowy flunky Eto Demerzel, hears of Seldon's
work and invites him to an audience. Wouldn't psychohistory be an
invaluable tool to cement his reign against instability and interlopers?
The problem is that Hari isn't sure that psychohistory is practical.

Soon, Seldon is on the run from the Emperor's cops. He's aided
by Chetter Hummin, a reporter who teams him up with the resourceful
(yet beautiful) Dors Venabili. Together Hari and Dors travel through
diverse sectors of Trantor, each with its own customs, foibles, and
colorful characters.
In their flight, Hari tries to piece together the mysterious origins
of humanity, and tie it into the centuries-old legends of
robots.

A small brag: although
Asimov is known for springing surprises on the reader
at the end
of his novels, I could see this one coming nearly from the start.
I still enjoyed the journey though.

The Interview

I took my low-courage stand against dictators and rented
The Interview via the iTunes store. It was good filthy
fun, with (as the MPAA puts it) "pervasive language, crude and sexual
humor, nudity, some drug use and bloody violence." It kept me chuckling
all the way through.

Given that the movie's premise has appeared ad nauseam
all over the Internet during the past few weeks, you probably
don't need this plot summary:

James Franco and Seth Rogen, respectively, play Dave Skylark (the
dimwitted host of a trashy celebrity interview show) and Aaron Rapaport
(his somewhat smarter producer). Stupid as he is, Dave has an uncanny
gift for getting his interview subjects to open up on-air to reveal
dark secrets. (Eminem: gay; Rob Lowe: bald.) It turns out that
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is a fan, and (incredibly)
Aaron makes the
arrangements for the show to broadcast live from Pyongyang.

But the CIA takes an interest, and persuades Dave and Aaron
to attempt to
assassinate Kim with a surreptitious dose of ricin. What could
go wrong? Everything, as it turns out.

I was impressed: there was nothing here to make a right-wing
freedom-loving troglodyte
like me toss his cookies. Kim makes an effort to appear human
and ingratiate
himself with Dave; this works, briefly, but only
because Dave is a gullible idiot. The movie doesn't go
into the dirty details of North Korean misery
and repression, but (hey) it's a comedy, and I don't recall
To Be Or Not To Be showing Auschwitz either.

The Phony Campaign

2016 Kickoff

Despite an overwhelming lack of popular demand, Pun Salad
is once again bringing its dull scalpel of political analysis
to the 2016 presidential season, the Phony Campaign. Cheap shots,
complete lack of respect,
and facile reasoning are our guidelines. Simply because the candidates
take themselves way too seriously is no reason why we should.

For newcomers: every so often,
Pun Salad tabulates how many Google hits
are associated with each presidential candidate's name when the additional
search term "phony" is added. This reveals how the Web views
the relative phoniness of the candidates, and how
those perceptions change over the course of
the campaign.

In our fantasy world, that is. In reality, these hit counts
almost certainly mean less than nothing. They're just an excuse
for Pun Salad to bitch about politics and politicians. Which
amuses Pun Salad, if nobody else.

Who to include? At least for now, we'll use a wagering
site where people bet their own money on likely nominees.
Our arbitrary cutoff will be 10-to-1 odds; we'll ignore longer shots.
That gives us seven candidates, two Democrats and five Republicans:

Jeb and Hillary
are—gulp!—the current favorites. (3.9-to-1 and 1.41-to-1, respectively.)
Pun Salad finds itself in strong agreement with (of all people)
Maureen
Dowd: "Before these two families release their death grip on the
American electoral system, we’re going to have to watch Chelsea’s
granddaughter try to knock off George P.’s grandson, Prescott Walker
Bush II." (See below for more on Ms. Dowd.)

While U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sleeps in her $5 million mansion in
Cambridge, and got paid $350,000 to teach just one class at Harvard, she
had the audacity to say in an interview with Jon Stewart this week that
“the system is rigged to benefit the rich.”

Making predictions about this stuff is perilous, but Liz's phony hit
count has to increase as the campaign wears on.

Also surprising is Jeb Bush's solid phony lead. More than Hillary?
More than Mitt? Please.
Jeb's real problem is his positions on Common Core and immigration,
which are anathema to a lot of the GOP base. And yet:

Bush, who earlier declared that a Republican must be
willing to “lose the primary” in order to win the general election,
announced this week that he is “actively exploring” a potential
presidential campaign. Aware that his positions on immigration and
Common Core will be significant hurdles, Bush seems intent on doubling
down on his moderate positions instead of flip-flopping and coming off
as a phony.

One problem with our methodology is that certain things are so
obviously true that nobody bothers to point them out. To
a certain extent, for example, calling Hillary a phony is akin
to calling water wet. This may explain her low numbers.
Still, we have the Clinton-loving website
Media Matters for America pointing out:

For more than twenty years, New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd has been attacking Hillary Clinton from a shallow
well of insults, routinely portraying the former secretary of state and
first lady as an unlikeable, power-hungry phony.

MMfA portrays this history as some sort of deranged obsession on Dowd's
part. Hillary non-fans will find it a fascinating summary of
why they never liked her.

The GOP is infested with anonymous
flacks and hacks who get a buzz from talking strategy with the New
York Times. They admit they might have to “play the race card” or
“go negative.” I don’t even know what the race card means any more, but
if you’re going to play it, play it. I’ve never met a poker player who
said, “I’m going for an inside straight.” And if you’re going to go
negative, by all means go negative. Don’t telegraph to all the world,
“This is just a cynical gambit we don’t really believe.” Outrage is so
much more believable if you don’t wink to the audience in advance. Don’t
worry, plenty of voters, never mind pundits, will catch your
phony
outrage without the advanced warning.

Joe

One of Ms. Salad's seemingly at-random picks out of the Netflix
bowl. She liked it much better than I did, and she didn't like
it that much.

Joe, the title character, is played by Nicolas Cage. He inhabits
a desperately poor area of (I think) Texas, an unending
sprawl of destitution. (The nicest structure that appears on
film, I think, is the local whorehouse.) Nearly everyone is
overly fond of alcohol and cigarettes. The local cops can only
hope to keep a lid on overt lawlessness, and they don't do such
a hot job of it.

Joe is an ex-con trying to go straight, but he has serious
anger issues. In what may have been a metaphor, had I
thought about it hard enough, his job is to manage a work gang that's
poisoning junk trees in order to make room for a future woodlot.
It's dirty and arduous work, but it keeps him honest-but-poor.

In comes Gary, a 15-year-old from an extremely dysfunctional family.
His dad is a (literally) murderous drunk, who terrorizes his mom and
probably sexually abuses his
mute
sister.
But he's relatively clean, wants to work hard. Joe takes a shine to him.

And then: mostly depressing stuff happens. It goes on
and on. And (spoiler alert) nearly
everyone winds up dead.

Not my cup of tea, although the IMDB raters have it slightly
above mediocre. IMDB trivia
saith that the guy who played
Gary's father was an actual homeless guy plucked off the
streets of Austin; he died, back on the streets, a few
weeks after the filming. Now that's authenticity. Not that it's fun
to watch.

What If

Not to be confused with the book
What
If? by Randall Munroe. (Which I got for Christmas,
thanks very much.) And, despite the title, it's not one of those
imaginative movies that explores what someone's life might be like
if they'd made one simple decision differently. Instead, it's a nice
little romantic comedy, and it's perfectly OK at that level.

As you can probably tell from the Amazon link image
over there on your right, one of the stars is Harry Potter himself,
Daniel Radcliffe, playing a slacker named Wallace. You might be
less familiar with the female lead, Zoe Kazan, who plays an amiable
goofball named Chantry. (She's Elia Kazan's granddaughter.) The movie
works due to their winning
chemistry, and above-average dialogue.

Mr. Radcliffe is British, Ms. Kazan is American, so (of course) the
movie is mostly set in Toronto, with them both playing Canadians.
(According to Wikipedia,
there was a minor controversy about the movie's "entirely caucasian
cast". Even though Toronto has, using the language of modern racial
pigeonholers, a 49% "visible minority population",
they're invisible here.)

Anyway: Wallace is in a lengthy funk from his betrayal by his previous
girlfriend. He meets Chantry at a party, and is enraptured by her
clever banter. But she lets him know right away: she has a boyfriend
named Ben (a nice guy), so it's strictly a let's-just-be-friends
deal. So that sets up the conflict: Wallace doesn't want to break
up Ben and Chantry. But he doesn't want to lose
her either.

There is the usual array of friends and relatives, all happy to offer
advice and to serve as plot devices.

As near as I can tell, this movie spent about 10 minutes in theatres
before going to DVD. Is it impossible to make a financially
successful PG-13 romantic comedy these days?

MerryChristmas!

Nine Dragons

I'm a longtime fan of Michael Connelly and (especially)
his series of books featuring LA police detective
Harry Bosch. But it's tough trying to keep up with
Connelly's output: this book is from 2009, and there
are still six later books from him in that mile-high to-be-read pile.

In this installment, Harry is investigating the murder
of the Chinese owner of a run-down convenience store.
He is (as always) the champion of the victim, but there's
more of a connection than usual: the victim had offered him
refuge in his store years back during a nasty riot.

Signs point to the involvement of the "Triad", a Chinese
organized crime gang, who had been shaking the store down
for protection money. Harry quickly ferrets out a suspect,
who he manages to nab just before he hops a flight out
of the country.

But things rapidly unwind: the actual evidence against the guy
is weak, and Harry gets two phone calls. One warning him to back
off, but that's nothing new. The second call is worse, though: Harry's
ex-wife Eleanor and their daughter Madeline live in Hong Kong,
and there's every indication that (somehow) Harry's arrest of
the Triad goon in LA has put his daughter in danger.

In other words: "this time, it's personal." And it's off to Hong
Kong, where frantic detective work alternates with a lot
of slam-bang action.

So: a good read. Colorful settings, a tricky and surprising
plot. You don't want to get on Harry's bad side. And just about
everyone (save his daughter) can get on his bad side.

An irrelevant note: A few months back,
I watched the Amazon Prime "pilot"
for Bosch, an online series featuring our hero.
Titus Welliver played Harry, and it is a tribute to his
acting chops that I "saw" him as I was reading this book.

In contrast: Tom Cruise recently played Jack Reacher in
a movie, and ever since seeing it, when I read Lee Child
books, I "see" Reacher as … Kiefer Sutherland. Sorry, Tom.

In almost every exchange, Gruber fell back on language you’d expect
from a stockbroker tied up in an S&M dungeon. I did it because I am
a flea! A worm! I am no master of the universe, I am nothing!
Punnnniissshhh meee!

All that was missing were some riding-crop and melted-candle-wax
welts, and maybe a shorn scrotum. Hey man, it’s a defense.

But it’s not a good one. You can blame your arrogance for calling the
American voters stupid, but you can’t blame your arrogance for claiming
that the bill was designed to hide taxes and deceive the public. If I
stab someone 34 times, the jury might want to hear about my arrogance,
but whether I’m arrogant or humble, it doesn’t change what I did — and
apologizing for it doesn’t clarify where the body is buried.

[…] Gruber's arrogance goes beyond the personal. He represents the arrogance
of the expert class writ large. They create systems, terms and rules
that no normal person on the outside can possibly penetrate. They make
life and living more complicated and then get rich and powerful off of
their ability to navigate that complexity. Time and again they sell
simplicity and security and deliver more complications and insecurity,
which in turn creates demand for more experts promising simplicity and
security the Gruberians never deliver.

So read both, and give thanks for Goldberg.

Could P. J. O'Rourke's employer, The Daily Beast,
make him write about Lena Dunham? Find out the awful truth
at "They Made Me Write About Lena Dunham".
Part of Peej's research was to watch an episode of Dunham's HBO series,
Girls.

The young people in Girls are miserable, peevish, depressed,
hate their bodies, themselves, their life, and each other. They occupy
apartments with the size and charm of the janitor’s closet, shared by
The Abominable Roommate. They dress in clothing from the flophouse
lost-and-found and are groomed with a hacksaw and gravel rake. They are
tattooed all over with things that don’t even look like things the way a
anchor or a mermaid or a heart inscribed “Mom” does, and they’re only
afewyears older than my daughters.

The characters in Girls take drugs. They “hook up” in a manner
that makes the casual sex of the 1960s seem like an arranged marriage in
Oman. And they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit and
they drink and they vomit.

It’s every parent’s nightmare. I had to have a lot to drink before I
could get to sleep after watching this show about young people who are
only a few years older than my daughters.

I like the homepage at MagicLeap.com.
Neal Stephenson is
involved with them somehow, so it—whatever "it" is—could
be indescribably wonderful.

Luck has become famous for congratulating—sincerely and
enthusiastically—any player to hit him hard. Any sack is met with a
hearty congratulations, such as ”great job” or “what a hit!” He yells it
after hard hits that don’t result in sacks, too. It is, players say,
just about the weirdest thing any quarterback does in the NFL.

Weird is a welcome relief from most of the NFL news this season.
If the Pats falter, I think I'll be cheering for the Colts.

The Bookwoman's Last Fling

I've been following John Dunning's mystery
series about cop-turned-bookseller
Cliff Janeway for a number of years. This one, which came out in 2006,
looks as if it will be the last; his website
says problems originating from a "large benign brain tumor"
have prevented further books. Here's hoping he's having a good
life otherwise.

Cliff has been called up
to a remote ranch to
evaluate the book collection of the late horse trainer
H. R. Geiger. (Not to be confused
with the disturbing
artist H. R. Giger.)
What Cliff finds is the remnants of an extremely dysfunctional
family (and family business), with surviving offspring
and employees squabbling over the estate, now in legal limbo.

The title's "bookwoman" is Candice, Geiger's lovely young wife
who predeceased him by several years.
When Janeway gets a chance to examine her collection,
he discovers that a number of rare and valuable volumes have
been snitched and replaced with crap.
And (eventually) it develops that he's expected to determine
whether Candice's death was due to foul play.

Janeway needs to untangle a Ross McDonald-like tangle of
bad behavior going back decades. He goes undercover, doing
horse-work with a trainer in order to plumb memories of
Candice, H. R., and their relatives and associates. It all
works out to an untidy conclusion.

I have to say: it was a long read, over 500 paperback pages. Could
have easily trimmed 150-200 of them without loss to plot, character,
or setting. But it's clear that Dunning loves the world of horse-racing
just as much as his normal rare-book world. It's funny: there's more
discussion of horse stuff here than there is in the typical
Dick Francis novel, and Francis was supposed to be the horse
guy.

URLs du Jour - 2014-12-10

Smith College President
Kathleen McCartney thought she was showing solidarity with students
protesting racism and police brutality when she sent a campus-wide
email with the subject line, "All Lives Matter." But the
anti-racism slogan popular with students is actually the more
selective "black lives matter."

Prez McCartney apologized. Abjectly. Of course.

At today's institutions of higher learning, you have to utter
your stupid slogans using exactly the right words.

(I thought there might also have been a perception that Prez McC
was making a subtle point about abortion. But it seems that
misconception was not seriously entertained: nobody thought
she was implying that unborn babies' lives matter. At Smith?
Be serious!)

University of Iowa President Sally Mason found herself apologizing
as well. Was her apology even more craven than President McCartney's?
It's a close call, I think.

University of Iowa (UI) students, faculty, and administrators are
speaking out in support of the censorship
of a statue created and displayed on campus by visiting professor Serhat
Tanyolacar that they say constitutes “hate speech.” Tanyolacar’s
piece comprised a seven foot tall sculpture of a Ku Klux Klan member
whose robes are crafted from newspaper articles about racial violence.
Many members of the UI community, however, ignored the intended
anti-racist message of the piece and instead demanded that the
university take action against what they perceive as a racist
display—and the university is complying.

President Mason apologized,
as did UI's Office of Strategic Communication (is there also
an office of Tactical Communication?). As did the artist.

To any mind not inclined to be offended, the "sculpture" was
clearly intended to be anti-racist (albeit lamely). But,
as at Smith, a lot of Hawkeyes decided to ignore intentions
and get outraged instead. The Iowa City collective
IQ dipped about 10 points, and gutless
self-censorship won. Yay!

Lena Dunham also
apologized.
(Although that apology is buried in, to quote Treacher,
a mass of
"self-pitying claptrap".)

But anyway:
when Lena wrote that passage in her recent book accusing
a library-employed, Oberlin College Republican named "Barry" of raping her back
in her college days, she didn't mean the actual
library-employed, Oberlin College
Republican named "Barry". That was—and I am not making this quote
up—"an unfortunate and surreal coincidence."

I must admit, I would have liked to see this
played out in court, with Lena paying "Barry" a very
large sum, enough to send his kids to … well, probably not Oberlin.
But it appears he's gonna let her off the hook.

He delivered a mea culpa of sorts in his opening remarks on Tuesday for
what he called his "mean and insulting" comments, explaining some of his
remarks while trying to take some of them back. After once saying a lack
of transparency helped the law pass, Gruber said Tuesday he does not
think it was passed in a "non-transparent fashion."
He also expressed regret for what he called "glib, thoughtless and
sometimes downright insulting comments."
"I sincerely apologize for conjecturing with a tone of expertise and for
doing so in such a disparaging fashion," Gruber said. "I knew better. I
know better. I'm embarrassed and I'm sorry."
He said he "behaved badly" but stressed that "my own inexcusable
arrogance is not a flaw in the Affordable Care Act."

Enough? But let me tell you what made me chuckle.

One of my favorite old sitcoms was "WKRP in Cincinnati". It
opened with a driver fiddling with his car radio, briefly
hitting a news station:

"And the senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not
explain his nudity."

Gruber could not fully explain his comments about subsidies through the
federal exchange—comments that Democrats fear will become grounds for
the Supreme Court to gut the law. But Gruber repeated Tuesday that he
always assumed in all of his economic models that subsidies would be
available for plans purchased through the federal exchange. He also
offered one theory on why he might have made those comments.

Or: "The professor, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not
explain…"

Free

The author, Alfred Mele, is a philosopher based at Florida State;
he specializes in the "free will" topic.
As you can tell from the
book's subtitle (Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will), he's
decided to argue for the survival of the concept. (Which, he argues,
is a choice he's freely made.)

It is a very slim book, under a hundred pages even counting References
and Index sections. (It's an actual book, though, and I am
counting it on the my list.)
It is aimed (fortunately for me) at the layman, and the style
is chatty and accessible.

So we have a philosopher at odds with "science", specifically
recent research in neurophysiology, psychology, and sociology:
it seems like the odds wouldn't be on his side. But (to my
mind) he does a good job of arguing that all those experiments
do not prove the non-existence of "free will". Instead, the
anti-free willers (Mele argues) are setting the bar for
what they consider to be "free will" absurdly high,
all the better to debunk it. If we define "free will"
reasonably
well ("modestly"), it appears that the concept survives.

To be sure, a number of experiments show that we can (for example)
fool
ourselves about the timing
of our choices; for example, a famous
experiment's neural monitoring demonstrates that a
subject's "decision" about when/whether to push a button can
actually be made a few hundred milliseconds before
the subject is conscious of the decision.

But, Mele argues, even if such observations apply
to some types of "decisions", the experiments
fail to show that they apply to all decisions.
The human decisions where experiments seem to demonstrate
"unfree" will
are those based in mental processes we share with animals: instincts,
reflexes, appetites, herd behavior, etc. Conscious, rational decisions
are another story.

It has long seemed to me that
arguments that free will is illusory
are self-refuting: if you're summoning rational
arguments and evidence to get me to change my mind
on the matter, you're already kind of admitting that
I have a choice to do so or not. So I'm on Mele's side.

I suppose to be fair, I need to read something on the other side.
This book
seems like the best bet. One reviewer says " Read it: you have no
choice." We'll see.

If you don't know what the "Elizabeth Lauten nonsense" is: (a) good for
you, it's stupid; (b) Mollie will provide you background. But it's
only the latest instance of the MSM's blatant double-standards, bias, and
hypocrisy in deciding what is to be considered "news".

Ms. Dunham claimed that her assailant was the host of a show
"Real Talk with Jimbo" on a local radio station, almost
certainly the campus radio station. Nolte's efforts
to check whether such a show existed were stonewalled
down the line, but not before the current station manager
deemed Nolte's efforts to check Dunham's story were "irrelevant"
and "could create a conflict of interest on campus regarding sexual
assault."

I'm thinking that if Dunham's story could have been
verified on this detail, Oberlin would have been a lot more
cooperative.

And John Nolte should be widely
commended for doing actual investigative
journalism. But he won't be.

A little astronomical geekery: a gentleman named Michael Zeiler
is looking forward to the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse
and after visiting his blog, perhaps you will be
too.

The highlight is an eight-inch by ten-foot (!) graphic
(if you printed it full size), that shows the path of the moon's shadow
as it will travel across the country from Oregon to South Carolina.
It is an amazingly fact-packed, beautiful visualization.
(You'll learn, for example, that "Hotels in Oregon in the center of the
eclipse path between Salem and Albany are scarce or already reserved.")

The April 8, 2024 eclipse
will be closer to us here in New Hampshire,
but, um, who knows how mobile we'll be then?

For Us, The Living

Three-word review: it's not good.

This was Robert A. Heinlein's "first novel", written around 1939.
He and his wife Ginny burned their copies of the manuscript shortly
before his death. But one copy he loaned out to
a would-be biographer was unearthed, and it made its way
into publication in 2004.

Based on reviews, I was (obviously) in no hurry to read it. But
it nagged at me: to have read every Heinlein novel except this
one was too much of an imperfection to bear. So I picked up
the paperback a few years ago, and it eventually got to the top
of the to-be-read queue, and… well, it took a long time to read
because I kept finding better things to do. As I said, it's not
good.

There isn't much of a plot, but here's the idea: in 1939, Navy
pilot Perry Nelson accidentally drives his car off a California
seaside cliff, getting pretty smashed up on the rocky beach below.
But (somehow) his conciousness gets transported to a different body
the year 2086. He's rescued by the lovely Diana, who introduces
him to this strange future world. After a few missteps, he finds
a good niche and lives happily on from there.

There are
seeds of Heinlein's
future stories here: moving express sidewalks ("The Roads
Must Roll"); Coventry, where incorrigable anti-social types are exiled;
ubiquitous flying cars; the threat of Nehemiah Scudder's theocracy
(he was victorious in Beyond This Horizon, defeated here); and so on.

It comes complete with an alternate history, one where FDR
was beaten by Arthur H. Vandenberg in the 1940 Presidential election.
(In actual fact, FDR stomped all over Wendell Willkie that year.)
No World War II for the US, but Europe went dark for awhile.
Gradually, the US transformed itself into (essentially) Utopia,
a free, prosperous, socially liberated land where a lot of people
are naked all the time, cheerfully inhaling vast clouds of tobacco
smoke.

The details of the brave new world
are tediously laid out in endless pedantic lectures
that Perry endures cheerfully. (Me, not so much.) Everybody remarks
on the backwardness of 1939 compared to the glorious present. After
a while I heard these lectures in my head as being delivered
in a high-pitched irritating nasality from bad 1930s movies.
The key concept is a wacky socialist sub-ideology
called Social Credit, which … well, I kind
of skimmed over that part, but Heinlein's lecturers go on
and on and on and on describing it, demonstrating its
obvious superiority via a simulation game involving
chess pieces, playing cards, and… yes, I skimmed over that
too, muttering "When. Will. You. Shut. Up. About. This."

I shouldn't be too hard on Heinlein's technological
predictions, of course. But:
in his 2086, there's no Internet. Or
computers. Or even lousy calculators: at one point
Perry whips out a slide rule. (Kids who don't know what
those were: click here.)
If you need to get information from one place
to another, you put it in a capsule and (shades of
ex-Senator Ted
Stevens) send it through a series of pneumatic tubes.
And, although rocket ships are used for long-distance air
travel, space exploration is just getting started.

And then there's sex, which is uninhibited and free from all those
1939-style taboos. The 2086 people just don't get Perry's
hangups, especially when he falls in love with Diana, but can't
abide it when her ex-flame shows up.

So, bottom line: a painful read, but at least I can say I've read 'em
all. And I'm glad he kept at it.

URLs du Jour - 2014-12-03

A message-free mug will only set you back, what, $7 or so? But if
you're a Democrat, apparently your party apparat
thinks you're willing to shell out more than that
in order to perfectly express your blind hatred.

If I were inclined to violate my own libertarian leanings, I’d lobby the
new Republican majority in Congress to enact the Better Expertise
Through Monetary Exposure Act of 2015 — the BET ME Act. The purpose of
the BET ME Act would be two-fold: First, it would impose accountability
on pundits and self-appointed experts of all descriptions by requiring
them to wager a month’s pay on the real-world outcome every time they
published a prediction.

Second, and consequently, it would surely eliminate the national debt in
a matter of months.

As Kevin notes, there are Constitutional issues. But…

I've occasionally avocated a similar proposal for politicians
and their legislation:

Each bill going through the legislature must explicitly describe,
precisely and objectively, the foreseen benefits it will
accomplish.

Then—this is the critical bit—if at any point
any of those benefits fails to materialize, the legislation
will immediately and automatically go out of effect.

I.e., force advocates of the bill to bet its continued
enforcement on whether it will do what
they claim it will. (It would be OK to claim that the bill would
have no measurable
benefits, but why then would anyone vote for it?)

Is there any doubt that if this provision
had been in effect in 2009, ObamaCare would have been gone
by now, and its advocates even more embarrassed than they
are?

Economic sanctions, when they have an effect at all, tend to inflict
misery on a targeted region’s civilian populace and often drive it
further into dependence on violent overlords. That truism will surprise
few libertarians, but apparently it still comes as news to many in
Washington, to judge from the reaction to this morning’s front-page Washington Post
account of the humanitarian fiasco brought about by the 2010
Dodd-Frank law’s “conflict minerals” provisions. According to
reporter Sudarsan Raghavan, these provisions “set off a chain of events
that has propelled millions of [African] miners and their families
deeper into poverty.” As they have lost access to their regular
incomes, some of these miners have even enlisted with the warlord
militias that were the law’s targets.

But I'm sure Dodd and Frank are quite proud of their handiwork.

At Reason, Ira
Stoll looks at the recently-defunct "green"
Xunlight Corporation, the latest "example of how government at all
levels—state and federal—and in both parties—Republican and Democrat
—wastes taxpayer money by subsidizing politically connected businesses."
Worth reading, especially if you think one party's more guilty than
the other on this issue.

I liked Jonah Goldberg's essay on integrity when it was
in my dead-trees National Review
and now it's out
from behind the NR paywall. He bemoans the
ever-more-popular Nietzschean concept that one must
"look within" for one's moral compass.

Such saccharine codswallop overturns millennia of moral teaching. It
takes the idea that we must apply reason to nature and our consciences
in order to discover what is moral and replaces it with the idea that if
it feels right, just do it, baby. Which, by the by, is exactly how Lex
Luthor sees the world. Übermenschy passion is now everyone’s lodestar.
As Reese Witherspoon says in Legally Blonde, “On our very
first day at Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle: ‘The law
is reason free from passion.’ Well, no offense to Aristotle, but in my
three years at Harvard I have come to find that passion is a key
ingredient to the study and practice of law — and of life.” Well, that
solves that. Nietzsche-Witherspoon 1, Aristotle 0.

Finally:
Readers on Pun Salad's "Default" view
might be interested in my takes on
some recent reads: The Up Side of Down
by longtime blogger Megan McArdle (aka "Jane Galt");
and The Norm Chronicles
by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter.

The Up Side of Down

I've been reading Megan McArdle ever since she emerged from
obscurity as "Jane Galt" on her "Live from the WTC" post-9/11 blog.
So checking out her first book, The Up Side of Down, was
an easy pick.

The book is (roughly) about failure. As the title implies, it's
not all bad! Good news for those of us whose personal lives
and professional
careers have had a few jarring bumps along the way. (I might
especially recommend the book to anyone in the midst
of such a setback.)

Megan (I call her Megan) tells the anecdote that undergirds
her philosophy of failure:

There is a famous story of a rich old man being interviewed by a young
striver, who asks him for the secret of his success. “Good judgment,”
says the magnate.

His eager young follower dutifully scribbles this down, then looks at
him expectantly. “And how do you get good judgment?”

“Experience!” says our terse tycoon.

“And how do you get experience?”

“Bad judgment!”

It's funny because it's true.

The book is wide-ranging (some might say "rambling"), but there
are all kinds of "shit happens" events that happen to people.
There are mistakes, malfeasance, miscommunications, … None are much
fun, but they oft contain the seeds of future success.

"Wide-ranging" might be an understatement: for example,
there's
an interesting section on bankruptcy. (No, I'm not kidding.)
It turns out the USA's bankruptcy laws are very lenient compared
to European countries; given our hardnosed reputation compared to
the mushy socialists of Eurpe, that's kind of surprising. Megan
argues this is a good thing: the important part of this
particular mode of financial failure is that one can start afresh
and do better the next time around.

Another chapter finds Megan investigating a response to
a totally different brand of failure: Hawaii's Project HOPE
is a probation setup for criminals who need to be weaned from the
bad habits that brought them afoul of the law. Monitoring the
offender is ongoing; infractions are dealt with promptly and
without uncertainty—it's back to jail for at least a few days.
This, Megan argues convincingly, is much more effective than the
standard setup on the mainland. It's also cheaper, since (in the long
term) recidivism
is decreased.

This is standard investigative/advocacy journalism, but
Megan is not reluctant to bring up examples from her own life:
her rocky romances (again: not kidding); getting out of debt
and getting back into it by buying a house; her
professional setbacks (going from a Chicago MBA to Bloomberg journalist
is not a typical career path). And even the story of her mother's
dicey encounter with appendicitis; the diagnosis was botched,
the hospital staff didn't always follow sterile practices, and
so on. (I happened to read this part concurrently with reading about
medical risks in The Norm Chronicles, so, yes, stay out of
the hospital if you can. It's not the safest place to be.)

"Welfare queen"-in-quotes implies
that's a term Reagan actually used at the time. He didn't, as near
as anyone can tell.
(He did use the term once in one of his post-campaign
radio commentaries, as an example of what other people
were calling her.)

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